The Orange at Dusk

The coiled cable lay on the conference table like a dead snake, its HDMI head staring blankly at the ceiling. Maya had forgotten to bring her dongle again. The third time this week.

'You're disconnected,' said Chen, not looking up from his phone.

'My dog was sick this morning,' she lied. Barnaby was fine. He was probably asleep on her Egyptian cotton sheets right now, dreaming of squirrels that would never be caught. The truth was she simply hadn't wanted to come in. The office felt like an aquarium where someone had forgotten to feed the fish for weeks.

The quarterly review slides awaited. Bull market forecasts, bull growth projections, bull—everything was bull except the numbers that actually mattered, which were slowly drowning in red. Marcus, the VP who delivered motivational speeches about 'synergy' while quietly preparing layoffs, clicked his pen. Click. Click. Click. Like a countdown.

'I'll just run it without visuals,' Maya said, though everyone knew presentations without projections were like marriages without intimacy—technically functional, but something fundamental was missing.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother: 'Your father's getting worse. He doesn't remember my name anymore.' An orange emoji followed, cheerful and grotesque.

Why the orange? she wondered. Why always the orange? Her mother used to keep a bowl of them on the kitchen counter, their bright skins promising freshness even as they slowly rotted from the inside. Like this company. Like her marriage to a man who had stopped seeing her years ago.

'Maya? The deck?' Marcus's voice cut through. He didn't actually care about the presentation. He needed to fill the hour before he could disappear into another meeting.

She opened her laptop anyway. The screen glowed with her incomplete slides. 'Bull growth in Q3,' the title proclaimed. She'd written it last night at 2 AM, drunk on expensive wine and cheaper hopelessness.

'Actually,' she said, standing up. 'I can't do this.'

The room went quiet. Even Chen looked up.

'My father is dying,' she continued, surprised by how steady her voice sounded. 'And my dog probably thinks I abandoned him. And this'—she gestured at the useless cable, the bullshit projections, the fluorescent lights that made everyone look sickly—'this isn't helping anyone.'

She walked out. Outside, the sky burned orange against the skyline. She hailed a taxi, went home, peeled an orange from the bowl on her counter, and fed it to Barnaby piece by piece. For the first time in months, she didn't feel disconnected at all.